Frederick W. Kagan mounts a spirited defense of maintaining our troop commitment to Iraq, presumably part of the battlefield preparation for Gen. Petraeus’s upcoming testimony in Washington. The article is long and detailed—he takes on more than a dozen of the arguments of the immediate withdrawalniks and answers them in turn. Unfortunately, I think it’s a waste of pixels.

Will anyone be convinced? I believe that practically everybody has already made up their minds and at this point relatively few will respond to even the most articulate, soundest, and well-founded arguments. It is now a religious dispute.

Fortunately, it doesn’t look as though any prospective president will withdraw our forces completely from Iraq. No candidate is running on that platform (note in statements the words “combat brigades”, a little over half of our forces in Iraq) and I doubt that any sitting president will be willing to run the risk of withdrawing from Iraq and having things go seriously awry.

If you take the idea that a president will withdraw our troops from Iraq and re-insert them if circumstances warrant seriously, try this exercise. Imagine you’re the president of the United States. Imagine you’ve withdrawn our forces from Iraq. Now imagine you’re standing at a podium preparing to announce that you’re going to send our forces back to Iraq. I can’t imagine myself doing that and I don’t think any prospective president can, either. The questions practically ask themselves. “Were you wrong then or are you wrong now?” leaps to mind.

费德瑞克.凯根坚决果敢地认为我们的军队应该对伊拉克共和国负责，可能部分原因是由于彼得雷乌斯将军即将要在华盛顿发表有关战场准备的陈述。这篇文章内容丰富详细——里面包含了十几个有关立即撤退的争论，并且给以有力回击。不幸的是，我觉的这实在是浪费电脑显示器的象素。

有人会相信吗？我相信每个人心中都会已经有了自己的想法，在这样的时刻，即使是思路再清晰、语言再动听、结构再合理的文章，也几乎没人会对它做任何回应。现在这是个宗教上的争议。

所幸的是，看来似乎将来也不会有哪个总统会从伊拉克全部撤离我们的军队。没有哪个候选人会这样做（注意陈述中“战斗军”这个词，我们在伊拉克军队的一半偏上都是“战斗军“），也没有哪个现任总统会冒着使情况变得更糟糕的风险撤离在伊拉克的军队。

如果你认为总统可以从伊拉克撤离军队，当境况变得严重的时候再运送军队过去。只是打个比方，设想一下如果你是美国总统。如果你从伊拉克撤离了我们的军队力量。现在假设你正站在指挥台上准备宣布你将要把我们的军队再次遣送回伊拉克。我自己不能想象会这样做，而且也相信我们的将来的总统也不会这样做。事实上他们的脑海里会闪现这样的疑问：你开始的指挥是错的，还是现在是错误的？